I'm confident that the wrong cinematographer on a project can very much derail the mood and the feeling on set when you're trying to create a bubble of trust, effectively.
There's always the temptation, as a cinematographer, to make the shot look as perfect as possible.
Robert Pattinson is an incredibly gifted actor. Every role that Pattinson plays is a contender for an acting award.
A perfect example is 'Zero Dark Thirty.' That's the closest thing to reportage that I've done because a lot of that was shooting from the hip and found images and giving the actors a lot of freedom to explore the space and not have to repeat their actions twice and basically workshop on-camera.
Everyone knows that a movie is false. But if as filmmakers we give the audience too many reasons to lose the suspension of disbelief, I believe we're working our way down a hole.
Looking through the camera lens reduces noise; as humans we see a million shapes, colours and textures. What the lens does, what art does in general, is get rid of all the noise. It hones in and isolates the qualities of a scene.
Where we shot in India, you could literally dump the camera off the back of the truck and you'd have an amazing shot.
For me, 'Mary Magdalene' is the most beautiful film I've shot with the performances and the script and the actors and ensemble. But not one saw it.
I had to forget a lot of 'Star Wars' when I was making 'Dune.' It wasn't hard, though.
The difference between a good shot and bad shot can be an inch to the left.
I've spent a lot of time in India. When I was a young cinematographer, I was completely enthralled by the color, the movement, the sounds. But photographically, it was very hard to capture it; photographs rarely did it justice.
When you're dealing with a shoot day that's costing somebody $300,000; when you're responsible for making that day; when you've got a half-million-dollar stunt that you've got to make sure you cover properly. You don't want to be doing that early in your career. You want to be making your mistakes when not many people are watching.
The key is you don't want to control the controlled stuff too much and you don't want to be too free flowing in uncontrolled situations. That can be a contentious issue with some directors. The joy of my career is I've gotten to work with great directors who get that balance.
It's been a dream to work alongside the talented team at Lucasfilm and ILM to make advancements and improvements to the filmmaking process to help tell stories more efficiently.
Every film that gets made, and I'm not just talking about 'Star Wars,' I'm talking about Marvel, DC, every tent pole film - they seem to just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. The worlds get bigger, the stakes get bigger.
I'm a firm believer, and some people may disagree, and I'm happy to have a beer with them and talk about it, but I believe that locations are such an integral character to the movie.
Star Wars has built-in scale. Everybody understands it, we know the scale of the universe.
Every single discussion I have with a first AD, or producers, is time of day. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've fought for early-morning calls. The light is 90 percent of our job; we as humans respond to light and where it is at different times of day and not only in positive ways.
You first and foremost need to be honest with the script because you don't want to do anything to screw up the basic fundamentals of the story. You don't want to create anything overly dramatic when you don't need to, and you don't want to create anything less dramatic than necessary, either.
India has a natural brownness to it, a natural yellowness, a sepia tone to it, with the dust in the air.
